


This is Not Your Home

by ohmyohpioneer



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Domestic, F/M, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 13:32:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6756175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyohpioneer/pseuds/ohmyohpioneer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killian says goodbye to Emma (to what could have been) in the Underworld. (Post-Firebird)</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is Not Your Home

If he blinks his eyes for just a moment, moves his head to the side this way, the house is as it should be - with its turret and fence. The columns of the porch sturdy and white.

He’s unsure of his fate beyond this limbo, but he’d venture to say that this building and all that it means - or was never able to mean - aren’t a part of what lies ahead. Real estate in the beyond, unlikely a concern for those with no mortal coil.

And even if it’s not the house, the stairs give as easily underfoot in acceptance ( _you are home, you are home, you are home_ ). In centuries of promises given (taken), kept and broken, this is the only one he can touch from down here. It exists above in a way he can’t, won’t ever again, and he’ll pull from it the last lees of comfort in its old boards down below.

The handle at the front door is brass, a smile curved against the wood, and he opens it once for the many times he would have arrived home. All of those days he would have absently pressed in with no mind to the way it feels at his palm when he’d come from the docks to Emma sitting at the couch, glasses traveling down her nose, papers (a book?) balanced on the gentle steeple of her knees. He steps over the threshold for every late night and early morning he’d step into the house - for the days he never had the chance to be weak with relief to see his bed, the nights he’d have taken sideways steps against the rum coursing through his system, the ones where he might have tucked his arm under her sleeping shoulder and resting legs and hoisted her against his chest.

It is still.

_This is not your home._

He takes in the heart of the house, breathes it in through his teeth and deep into his lungs and holds it there. Allows his mind to piece together the way Emma would exist in this atmosphere, how it would change at the bend of her elbow or the arch of her foot.

Kitchen and bare feet against tile, tired lights humming in morning hours, and the sputter of a machine churning coffee that will never occupy this space. An exact set of movements and sounds that will never play out. He takes this, too, and makes it real, steals what he can. Places her hair piled messy and face-splitting yawn here, where they never have been and won’t. Imaginings to memories, memories to heart - bone deep delusions, just this once.

He thinks on how she would have looked framed in that window - the bay one with the sea just beyond - arms crossed in defense or shoulders loose with laughter or hands and splayed fingers reaching high overhead to take the tight ache from her back or hunched to jot a note ( _home soon, home soon, home, home_ ).

It’s not that it wasn’t enough. It was more. Emma was more. It was - this failure hurts more than others. Promise made, promise aborted.

A home, a place to settle, to be alongside someone else. This was his hope, his only way to say we can rest, we are lost together (nearly found).

Lost to the future - lost to the present now, too - the cry of the ascent to their bedroom creaking each heavy step. Not theirs - but _almost_ and _not quite_ and _in dreams_ theirs.

It’s a simple room, and she stands beside the end table, pulls the ringers from her fingers, the jewelry from her ears, places them carefully, turns to him and lets her mouth turn up. He unmakes the bed neatly. Stares at the folded back hem, an even line across the expanse. He makes it again ( _make the bed, love, make it, make it_ ).

He unmakes it again without precision, tears down the sheet, throws the quilt, pretends that the turn of her hips and the restlessness of her legs have done this. Linen tangled and he takes those quiet, urgent, gasping moments in the loft that are memories - the ones that were real and too few - and puts them here.

Lies down.

The ceiling is uneven and there are fissures at the edges, hazy scarlet like the rest of this. He traces the splintering lines; it is night and she is in the place where his arm and chest make space for her. Fills in the space where hair cascades gold and she turns, soft mouth moving words into him ( _sleep, sleep, sleep love_ ), limb over limb.

It is warm and unreal and all that he has in this place, in this world, in this house that was never what he had promised it would be. It is not Future or Past, it is the Inbetween, the Without Meaning.

But in the Inbetween she is here and there is love. He curls in and she does too. Perhaps above she is not sleeping, she is curled in - maybe she is looking at the place he would have been.

“Goodnight, love,” he would, does, say to this room, to the apparition of the woman with her leg through his knees and her hands at his jaw, brushing at his brow.

He hopes that this is it, that this is his business, finished, that having home, _having Emma_ , is it. The end, the sigh where he dips beneath surface at last.

“Captain? Captain Jones?”

The light hasn’t relented, but his eyes have clearly been closed for some time, and he blinks at the voice.

“It’s me?” A young girl, unsure. “It’s Megara.”

Emma isn’t at his side, and his neck aches.

“Please. We have to go. Captain Jones?”

And he fully wakes to a tentative hand thrust at his person, rattling his shoulder. “He requests your audience.”

He, he. “He?”

“Zeus, sir,” she gazes about the room, catches her glance on a framed picture - his face beside Emma’s, a real memory in a purgatorial facsimile. “Zeus is waiting. We have to go.”

This is not your home ( _go home_ ).


End file.
